The Geopolitics of Vernacularity and Sinographs: The Making of Bilingual Dictionaries in Modern Korea and the Shift from Sinographic Cosmopolis to “Sinographic Mediapolis”

要旨

This chapter examines the range of cultural practices arising from the gap between Literary Sinitic and the Korean language and script—the cosmopolitan and the vernacular—beginning with the invention of the Korean alphabet in the fifteenth century and concluding with the demise of the Sinographic Cosmopolis in the twentieth century. The writing system of han’gŭl is theorized not as a form of discrete vernacularization or a tool for teaching or controlling the people, but rather as a technology-cum-strategy for controlling the relations between China and Chosŏn, Sinicization and de-Sinicization, the king and his people, and among the people themselves. At the turn of the twentieth century and into the Japanese colonial period, this writing technology aided in aurally mediating the relationship between the Latin Cosmopolis and Sinographic Cosmopolis, as bilingual dictionaries published by Western missionaries for the first time began to establish a relationship of translational equivalence between Western languages and Sino-Korean terminology. The Sinographic Cosmopolis, based in Korea on a relationship between vernacular Korean and Literary Sinitic, thus morphed into a Sinographic Mediapolis, centered on the current and potentially future cosmopolitan languages of the Latin Cosmopolis and Japanese and Korean incorporating indigenized Sino-Korean vocabulary via Japanese and sinographs as remnants of the cosmopolis. As Japan extended direct control over the Korean Peninsula, the Japanese language began to dominate the relationship between the vernacular and the cosmopolis through translation and inscriptional style (munch’e 文體). Japan usurped the status of the cosmopolitan through colonial domination, and Korean sinographic terminology previously connected to the Latin Cosmopolis through bilingual dictionary compilation came to be dictated by Imperial Japan. By the 1930s, sinographs were no longer a script that mediated “the east Asian,” but instead had come to symbolize Japanese supremacy, eventually auguring a second linguistic revolution aimed at the transliteration of loan words in the ascendant English language and the eclipsing of the Sinographic Mediapolis.

主題